


Kindred Spirits are not as Scarce as I Used to Think

by lubilu17



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Joyce Byers is the actual love of my life, Post Season 2, aka spooky things happen in other states and it all comes back to Hawkins, and hopper, im not entirely sure what to tag this as without giving away any kind of spoilers, just putting that out there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 23:54:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12922875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lubilu17/pseuds/lubilu17
Summary: The Department of Energy only had control of Hawkins lab. They only took new born babies. Sara Hopper definitely died in that hospital bed. Three facts, perfectly true.Or were they?





	Kindred Spirits are not as Scarce as I Used to Think

There’s some similarities between the two girls. They have the same look in their eyes as they gaze up at him with wonder when he does anything slightly cool. They both laugh with all of their body, shoulders shaking, head thrown back, little snorts coming through every so often. They both have the same curious gaze, looking out on the world as if they’d never seen it before in their life.

Well, one of them still does those things. The other _did_ them all many years ago.

Most days Hopper would say that El was the puzzle piece he was missing to complete his life, but there were the moments where it all came rushing back to him. When El smiled at him, baring all of her teeth, eyes and nose scrunched up adorably. She smiled at him in the way she used to, and the puzzle fell apart slightly. The Sara shaped hole in his heart reappear and all he wanted to do was waste away into the ground never to be seen again and never to think about her again.

But for all the times El reminded him of Sara, there were the times where he remembered they were completely different people. Different people with different lives. El’s hair, thick, dark and curled around her collarbones was in contrast with the fine, blonde hair Sara once had. Sara’s missing tooth had never had the chance to grow in, and there was El with her full set of teeth. Two blue bands once worn in Sara’s hair now braided and wrapped around El’s wrist brought tears to his eyes every time he saw it.

There were still days where he dreamed of the doctors, the wires, and the chemo. Of the day when Sara had gone to take tie out of her hair and along with the bands the majority of the hair came with it. Of Diane’s screams and his frozen despair. There were days when the only thing he could remember was the day when they had to go to a funeral home to look for a child sized coffin. There were moments when the only thing he could feel was the earth he dropped on her coffin between his fingertips, damp and grainy.

El had never really asked Hopper for specifics about what had happened to Sara, as if she knew he didn’t want to talk about her, couldn’t talk about her. However, she still have him pitying looks every time he brought her a new book with the name _Sara Hopper_ written on the front page in a handwriting that was neither the messy scrawl of Hopper himself, or the clumsy letters of a young child.

They’d visited her grave one day in the summer, almost a year after Hopper had officially adopted El. She’d brought a bunch of flowers that Joyce had given her and gingerly placed them on the warm stone. It wasn’t uncommon to find Hopper sat in front of the stone, usually with his head at the bottom of a bottle and his mind in some dark reality. But now there was no bottle in sight, only another young girl, petite and dark haired. El had ripped another tear in his heart that day when she reached down, touched the grave and whispered something he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to have heard.

“ _Sister_ ”

It hadn’t been the way she’d called Kali her sister, she’d been almost unsure in herself and it broke his heart even more.

Joyce would still come round every time El called her on the radio on the days where he couldn’t get out of bed and she’d sit with them both. She’d look after El like the saint she is and then she’d coax Hopper out of bed with the promise of a cooked breakfast and a day where he didn’t have to go to work.

Every time El sat down with a new book, slowly reading the words aloud, pointing to new ones that she didn’t know the meanings of, repeating them until she had perfected the pronunciation, she reminded him of a girl even younger than her dwarfed in a hospital bed pointing out different planets in her book on space.

There was only really one thing that stuck out to Hopper throughout the year that El had officially been his daughter. It was something that went from being absolutely terrifying to being the best thing that had ever happened to him. A second chance. An attempt to try again. It was something that almost every parent who had lost a child wished for at some point and for no reason that had ever presented itself to him his wish had been granted. He was officially the father of another child, another person who could depend on him for everything they needed. Everything El wanted and needed he’d be there for her. He could make her life better. He couldn’t take away from the horrors of her past, no one could, but he can make her future bright and happy. He, along with Joyce, could make another little girls life better than it had been in the past.

Because El is here and Sara could never be.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make my soul sing!!!


End file.
